Students at Arts will find that efforts are being made at many different levels to ensure coherence in the degree programmes, both on individual courses between learning activities and exams, and across courses in relation to the total workload for students, for example.
During the courses, students will meet active researchers who teach. The heads of department are responsible for staffing the courses, as they have an overview of the connection between courses and research areas. The teaching staff organise the teaching as full-time study. In dialogue with the degree programme board, the head of department ensures that the workload on individual courses is coordinated so that it is appropriate and the teaching formats are varied. This is evaluated in the Danish Student Survey and can be evaluated in the teaching evaluations.
The development of teaching and teaching formats takes place on an ongoing basis by groups of teaching staff and degree programme boards involving teaching evaluations and on the basis of current research.
In connection with the development of a new set of academic regulations, teaching staff on the Master's degree programme in Media Studies have worked with the principles of student-centred learning (SCL). In the organisation of
teaching, students' academic interests were taken into consideration as a guiding principle in the course. Within this pedagogical paradigm, the students' role changes from being passive recipients to becoming active co-instructors.
For example, students on the Research Design and Method course work with case studies in project groups. The lecturers take on the role as facilitators and supervisors. The framework of the course is very open, and the students have to choose what they want to work on and how they want to examine the phenomenon they have chosen to focus on. The students are very much involved in the process, and this requires a great deal of openness and flexibility from the lecturers.
Before the first students under the new academic regulations have completed the course, the academic environment has invested hours in devising possible teaching formats, balancing expectations between lecturers, and cross-faculty coordination to ensure the most optimal outcome and the best possible framework for student learning.
At Arts, we have decided that Bachelor’s degree students must be offered 168 contact hours per semester and Master’s degree students must be offered 112 contact hours per semester. Indicator 3 (scheduled hours) shows the number of hours (teaching and supervision hours) that AU is planning to offer the students on average per 30 ECTS, i.e. number of hours/30 ECTS, corresponding to each semester.
The number of ECTS excludes courses with a Master's thesis, Bachelor's project, compulsory study abroad and project placement.
University degree programmes must be organised as full-time degree programmes, and the heads of department and directors of studies are responsible for ensuring this. The students' assessments of how much time they spend is shown in indicator 7 (time on task). The indicator shows the average student responses to the question: “How many hours are you spending on taught courses, personal study time and work placement in a typical week during the current semester/half-year period?”.
